Technical Field
The present invention relates to search query processing and, in particular, to handling queries that return no result.
Description of the Related Art
Search queries in, for example, e-commerce settings, frequently return no result (i.e., an empty result) for many searches. Receiving no result can be very frustrating for a user, reducing turnover and potentially driving the user to a competitor's service. In addition, manually rewriting a query (particularly if it is at all complicated) can be time consuming and error-prone.
In particular, users often attempt to search for very specific things (e.g., a specific brand and model of an appliance on an e-commerce website). These queries can be long and difficult to remember. Product identifiers may have very unintuitive names, such as, “xqg70-wm10e1681w,” for example to represent a manufacturer's product designation, and these may differ by very small degrees from similar products—often there is no intuitive mapping between the product identifier and the name of the product. However, such product identifiers are frequently used for, e.g., comparison shopping between different sites, where the customer copies the product information from one site to another for price comparison.
One difficulty is that the product specifications are not always the same between sites, for example where the same product may have a different character sequence as the product identifier. In one specific example of this case, essentially the same product may be available on a different site, having the same functions and features, but may be deemed to be a different product by the manufacturer due to a minor variation in, e.g., color. This could result in no result to the query, and it is difficult to know whether that failure is due to a difference in product specification or because the second site does not actually carry the product.